Roadside rubbish – is it getting worse everywhere?

I drove to work today for the fourth time ever due to recovering from illness.

Apart from being a waste of time compared to cycle commuting, I notice how dreadful the roadside rubbish situation is becoming. (Motorway, dual carriageway and single lane trunk roads).

Is this to do with people throwing more rubbish, it falling off lorries or cuts meaning less clearing-up? I see it everywhere I go in the UK. 🙁

Yep – getting worse here too. Throw away society. Literally!

Agreed. Here in S.Wales the mountain common land is even worse.

My g/f has just spent a week over here from Konstanz Germany, she kept saying I love the island, England is so nice, but I can’t believe how much litter there is everywhere….

I agree – and at the moment I live in a very rural area 🙄

Being a passengers his week, as I’m usually the designated driver, I made this comment.. The dual carrigeways are ridiculously covered in crap. What wrong with ppl, that the have to throw rubbish out the window as the drive? Ffs leave it in the footwell & transfer it to the bin when you get to your destination….

our local council have privatised the prosecution of litter dropers ,a fine of 80 quid and a court summons usually has a good effect, thousands have been fined i the last few months, and littering has gone down a lot.

http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/51-people-due-court-litter-10570756

A3 is shocking – its like an open top rubbish lorry has driven through in high wind. Terrible

Here’s a fairly interesting little vid from Highways England Link

It’s very noticeable when you come back from abroad. People in this country expect everything to be cleared up for them, it’s very sad.

Sad thing I realised a while ago is that you don’t really need signs to let you know how far to the next services or maccies, you can tell by the volume of rubbish scattered down the road leading from them.

One reason why I dislike trail centres is the disgusting quantity of plastic drink bottles bought from the cafe that I’ve found scattered along the fist mile or two of the trail.

It makes me wonder why we haven’t got armies of community service types (the 10s of thousands not sent to prison) sorting it out. Or perhaps incentivise some of those seeking work to get an extra £50 a week to be part of a 40hr a week clean up gang. It’s truly embarrassing how littered and down at heel much of this country is

A surfer called Martin Dorey has been running a campaign called #2minutebeachclean for a couple of years to document and tackle beach and marine litter. The idea is that when you go to the beach you spend a couple of minutes picking up and disposing of a few it of rubbish. Maybe its time for a #2minutetrailclean

Yes, definitely worse now than I can remember since I was a kid in the 1960’s-70’s. Some of it may be down to councils no longer having the money to spend on litter picking, but I think a lot of it is down to the seemingly general lazy oafish behaviour of the average British inhabitant. National pride in the UK seems to extend to supporting the National football team, or putting a National flag sticker on your vehicle (and then throwing rubbish out of it!).

I’ve driven around Western Europe quite a bit, especially in the last 10 years, and the abundance of litter everywhere in the UK is really noticeable once I leave the ferry or chunnel. Interested to read andyt1054 g/f’s comment, as I’ve heard the same from Finnish, Greek and Dutch friends – all of them love the country and the people, but commented about the litter ….oh, and the amount of fat people :))

Glasgow might be getting ever-so-slightly better, but only becuase it was so bad to start with 🙁

and this

People in this country expect everything to be cleared up for them, it’s very sad.

It always amazes me how far away from a McDonald’s you find their cartons. There should definitely be a **** wit tax levied on them.

I’ve recently taken up a long commute along the A27 and A34, the litter is phenomenal, I can’t quite believe how bad it’s got.

You can tell when the A34 leaves Hampshire and enters Oxfordshire, Oxfordshire is a non stop procession of thick litter. There must be tonnes of it.

Who drops it? I don’t know anyone who’d dream of dropping litter.

I’ve always wondered why McDonalds don’t print your car registration number on the food packaging at drive throughs – it would stop littering overnight if a few people were fined after being traced by it.

Would cut down the need for this

Plenty happening here

Here

our local council have privatised the prosecution of litter dropers ,a fine of 80 quid and a court summons usually has a good effect, thousands have been fined i the last few months, and littering has gone down a lot.

That’s a great idea, If my local councillor did that and also chased the dirty bastards that let their dogs shite at will, I’d bloody canvas for them!.

Good plan Trailseeker! I well remember my beach cleaning student job – wandering around with a picker and a bin bag.

One little darling threw his empty burger box on the ground and his mum awkwardly told him to pick it up (I was standing about six feet away). Kid’s response was,”It’s his job to do that”. Dad laughed and they all walked off.

If my litter picker had had a spike on it, I’d still be doing time.

It bothers me hugely that so, so many people think it’s perfectly normal to just lob their rubbish wherever they like – adults are just as bad as kids IME.

In contrast, when I provided my local authority (Craven) with good evidence of the source of load of flytipped rubbish just inside the national park, they didn’t even bother contacting me.

Which could partly explain why there is a fresh load of house clearance crap up that particular lane appearing on a regular basis.

More than once when I have challenged people the response is “I’m keeping someone in a job!”.
Kids still do it because it’s “macho”

I returned a half eaten fish supper once back through a car window. They were raging. 🙂

As a society we need to make people feel these things aren’t acceptable – hopefully without getting punched. It does seem the norm for smokers is to drop fag ends after use, and gum gets spat out. To many litter isn’t their responsibility so they don’t feel bad about dropping it and must be challenged!

teamhurtmore – Member
A3 is shocking – its like an open top rubbish lorry has driven through in high wind. Terrible

I agree, I use the A3 every week.. It’s bloody shocking when you get upto Frensham/Bordon then just south of Guildford, then the long run to the M25 is just awful.

In all the time I’ve been driving I’ve honestly never seen anyone throw rubbish out of the windows of cars/trucks.. fags yes, but nothing else.

I’m confused as to where it all comes from.

It saddened me last year when touring Shetland, Orkney and the Highlands. Litter in the ditches everywhere. Who, exactly, thinks that’s OK? Applies everywhere but particularly in the most beautiful parts of this country.

Some good ideas above. If everyone spent 2 minutes of their surf / ride / walk / climb time filling a bag it would make a huge difference.

It’s definitely not just roads. I do the odd organised litter pick as a Volunteer Sustrans Ranger to help keep the paths clear.

We can spend a morning on a short half mile stretch and easily fill a dozen large bin bags of cans, packets, bottles,and general rubbish. It’s really disheartening.

When people stop to talk to us they are often amazed we have volunteered and say things like “The council should be doing this” when the reality is that it shouldn’t need doing in the first place!

It’s accumulating innit, so it’s going to look worse and worse even at the same rate.

It’s awful though. From observing litter droppers, I think a lot of people genuinely have no idea they are doing anything wrong. They just think that’s what you do with your rubbish.

In fact, look at the comment on that Highways Agency video accusing them of “a clear breach of their Environmental Protection Act S89 duty” because they “allowed litter to accumulate until at least 1st February – almost 2 months” 😯

They shouldn’t need to clear litter that often and there is no way they have the budget to do so.

Councils may well be prosecuting but what they need is publicity. Governments have succeeded in making drink-driving antisocial but I bet all the campaigns have cost a fortune. Printing postcodes or car regs on packaging may help as might a deposit on plastic bottles.

council here have gone from monthly to twice a year litter picking because of cuts. Its inevitable litter has got worse.

Some lovely person dumped a load of rubbish out their car window on the road outside my house, my neighbour was coming out so they had to stop. Apparently he reversed out, got out his car, picked the rubbish up, opened their door and chucked it all back in. They were a bit upset, arrisoles.

Haha! The U.K. Is absolutely sparkling compared to over here in Brazil where they clog up streams and rivers with rubbish which then become breeding grounds for all sorts of diseases. Having said that one city Belo Horizonte I believe have stopped giving away plastic bags with shopping, you can’t even buy them for 5p like in tesco, people quickly learn to take their own bags.

I like the idea of fining people or perhaps in the future it will degrade much quicker through advances in technology.

Throw away society and council cuts means fewer people to deal with it.

Still, the implosion of the NHS and social care should reduce the population enough to reduce the rubbish problem….

It’s very noticeable when you come back from abroad. People in this country expect everything to be cleared up for them, it’s very sad.

This, I noticed most when I came back from a year abroad. Really bums you out.

If you want to see something worse google “Maldives Rubbish Island”

A guy in his 50s in the car in front of me this morning threw his empty fag packet and a wrapper out of the window, I pull along side him and screamed at him for being a “scruffy c**t and ask why he did it… He could give a reason and just said sorry…
Strange answer but my early am grumpy face screaming in his car window will hopefully stop him from doing it again.

Roadside?
Anyone used the train from the Northern Outhouse Powerhouse of Manchester up to Leyland (which I guess is a Northern Fusebox)?

As you pull out of the station there is land-fill site worth of garbage on the trackside. A biblical amount.

I thought the run in to Birmingham was grim but, wow. 😯

Yeah- Litter, dog muck, and dog muck bags everywhere 🙁
Amongst the usual empty cans and rubbish from take aways, I saw 2 Benecol bottles at the side of the road near Macclesfield Forest on Sunday. Seems a strange thing to take out with you and chuck out of the car. And don’t get me started on the volume of dog muck on the walking trails at Macclesfield Forest- I went for a walk there recently and there was a dollop of dogshit literally every step of the way for the first few hundred metres from the car park despite the provision of plenty of dog muck bins, and warning signs of CCTV. These are people who have made a choice to drive up to a beautiful part of the country for a walk and think it’s fine to ruin the place for themselves and everyone else!

Yep, it’s disgusting, the country is a dump thanks to lazy inconsiderate c words. I hate them.

I’m a postie and the estates I deliver to are horrendous, people are rats. You can’t expect them to keep other places clear of rubbish when their own front gardens are used as rubbish bins and ash trays. Same people who never ever put out any recycling.

Lazy feckless scummy rats

As mentioned above rail sides never get cleared and it just mounds up. I’d love to be a litter picker, out doors all day, making an improvement.
I watched 3 council litter pickers last week on one of the roads I was delivering on, they missed 2/3rds of the litter! Useless

We all complain about it on here but quite a few moan about the latest national scheme to tidy up!

It always amazes me how far away from a McDonald’s you find their cartons. There should definitely be a **** wit tax levied on them.

+1 for sure. I saw some Mc ShiteyDonalds packaging on the road between Reeth & Gunnerside. Effing scruffy tramps. 👿